South Sudan's Civil War

Violence, Insurgency and Failed Peacemaking

John Young

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786993755
• eBook ISBN: 9781786993779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A mere two years after achieving independence, South Sudan in 2013 descended into violent civil war, refuting US government claims that the country's succession was a major foreign policy success and would end endemic conflict. Worse was to follow when the international community declared famine in 2017. In the first book-length study of the South Sudan civil war, John Young draws on his close but critical relationship with the rebel SPLM-IO leadership to reveal the true dynamics of the conflict, and exposes how the South Sudanese state was in crisis long before the outbreak of war.

With insider knowledge of the histories and motivations of the rebellion's chief protagonists, Young argues considerable responsibility for the present state of South Sudan must be laid at the door of the US-led peace process. Linking the role of the international community with the country's opposition politics, South Sudan's Civil War is an essential guide to the causes and consequences of the violence that has engulfed one of Africa's most troubled nations.

1 THE DEEP ROOTS AND TWISTED PATH TO CIVIL WAR

Introduction

This chapter begins with a potted history of southern Sudan up to the signing of the peace agreements in 2005 and 2006 which makes clear the incomplete incorporation of the territory under three different regimes and the many political and developmental handicaps it faced in the lead up to independence. These obstacles should have precluded consideration of South Sudan’s independence, particularly under the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), which had not militarily defeated the Sudanese army, nor demonstrated any competence in administering its liberated territories.

The chapter will then turn to a more detailed consideration of the transitional period when the SPLM attempted and failed to bring peace to the war-weary people of South Sudan, establish a viable and democratic administration as per the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005, overcome its internal conflicts, and generate development in one of the poorest countries on the planet. Lacking a viable ideology and with a leadership more dependent upon the international community than its own people, the SPLM stumbled from one political and military crisis to the next. Coming to power at a time of high oil prices, the SPLM was able to temporarily buy off discontented and ambitious politicians and generals, but this approach was not sustainable, encouraged more demands on the state and ruling party and could not continue when oil prices crashed. For a movement built on militarism and with limited political skills it could only respond to crises by resorting to violence and this paved the way for the outbreak of the entirely predictable civil war.

Beginnings to the First Civil War

The problem of southern Sudan can be dated to the British campaign to free General Charles Gordon, who in the service of the Ottoman Empire to end slavery in southern Sudan found himself besieged in Khartoum by the army of the Mahdi, a would-be Islamic reformer. But in a classic tragedy the rescuing force arrived only days after he had been killed and the city captured. While the British government played on the sentiments of the public to rescue Gordon, the real intention was to gain control of the upper reaches of the Nile to ensure the security of the Suez Canal and the route to India. Having captured this vast territory and its polyglot of people, however, the British had to administer it. In the economically viable and strategically more significant lands along the northern stretches of the Nile the British constructed one of its most developed colonies in Africa. At its core was the Gezira Scheme, which harvested the waters of the Blue and While Niles to produce the largest agricultural project in Africa. But the counterpoint to the developed northern riverine core were the largely ignored lands of the Moslem east and west, and the pagan south.

Southern Sudan was brought into the global economy by trade in ivory and slaves and the encroachment of the Mahdists in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, British policy to end slavery and control the ivory trade largely ended the only formal economy in southern Sudan. With the disparate peoples of the south too divided by tribe to pose a threat to the British, the new colonial power did little to develop the economy, operated through existing structures, and the result was an administration of benign neglect.

Southern Sudan hosted a diverse population of pastoralists, the biggest tribes being the Dinka and Nuer, and many small tribes of subsistence farmers in the better watered tropical lands of Equatoria in the far south. Social organization ranged from the kingships of the Zande, Shilluk, and Anuak, to the largely stateless Nuer. While the Dinka and Nuer are best considered nations in their own right with their often warring clans and sections, the harsh environment and lack of development ensured the survival of a host of smaller tribes. What these people shared was the lands of the Nile basin and a common struggle for scarce resources, principally grazing lands and water. In the north the pastoralists also shared their lands with Arabized Islamic nomads, who moved their herds to the better-watered lands to the south on a yearly cycle that frequently produced conflict.

In time, the plight of the southern Sudanese gained the interest of British humanitarians and Christians who feared that Islam spread by itinerant northern Sudanese traders – jalabas – would convert the indigenous people. Although not welcomed by the non-Moslem British colonial administration, missionaries from various denominations set up Christian schools and churches that catered to a minuscule number of students drawn from the traditional elite. To further ‘protect’ the southern peoples and those on the northern border lands from Moslem conversion, the British administration established ‘closed districts’ which stopped the trade of the jalabas, and even precluded the use of the Arabic language and wearing of Arab clothing. In time this led to the formation of an elite closely linked to the colonial state, English speaking, Christian, anti-Moslem, and anti-Arab.

These developments served to isolate southern Sudan from its natural links to the north and place it on a path of unity with the non-Moslem British colonies in eastern Africa. Late in the day, however, the colonial authorities changed their mind and decided that northern and southern Sudan should be united in preparation for eventual independence. Appreciating the enormous discrepancy in development between the north and south, the British began to develop the south, but during the Second World War it had few resources and after the war it was near bankrupt. Nonetheless and to the surprise of the colonial authorities by the 1950s they faced demands for independence from a politically conscious riverine north that they were ill-placed to resist.

First Civil War

The traditional southern Sudanese elite knew they were an unequal match for unity with their northern counterparts and only agreed because of British pressure and the commitment of northerners to a federal system to ensure British colonialism would not be replaced by northern Sudanese colonialism. In the event, successive northern governments failed to keep that commitment and instead attempted to construct a Western-modelled nation-state with one national religion, Islam, and one culture, Arabism.¹ In response, armed resistance to northern incorporation began even before Sudan gained independence on 1 January 1956, but became more sustained during the 1960s when the various rebel forces united to form the South Sudan Liberation Army (SSLA), or Anyanya, and demanded secession of the south. With the assistance of the region and Israel (always anxious to undermine an Arab state) the SSLA was increasingly able to challenge the Khartoum government.

In 1969 General Jafar Nimeiri came to power through a coup, but after failing to suppress the southern rebellion he decided to opt for peace. This took the form of the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972, brokered by Emperor Haile-Selassie, under which the SSLA reluctantly accepted a federal system of government. When compared to the experience of the independent SPLM government, the post-Addis Ababa Agreement southern governments performed reasonably well – the leaders came from both senior military and civilian backgrounds, accepted parliamentary democracy, and had some administrative skills. In contrast, the post-2005 SPLM government was almost exclusively military, lacked administrative experience, suffered from endemic tribalism, and had little of the tolerance of its predecessor. Both regimes, however, suffered from the perennial problem, caused by the efforts of the cattle-raising Dinka, to dominate the country. This problem came to the fore when the more developed and largely farming Equatorians appealed to Nimeiri to break the Addis Ababa Agreement and divide the south into regions. Nimeiri agreed, much to the anger of the Dinka elite, and this set the territory on course to Sudan’s second major civil war.

Second Civil War

The second civil war began with the desertion of southern soldiers based in the south who refused orders to be transferred to the north and fled to the western Ethiopian territory of Gambella. Dr John Garang, a Dinka and colonel in the national army who acquired his PhD at Iowa State University, was ordered by his superiors to suppress the growing rebellion. Instead he defected to Gambella and after defeating his opponents appointed himself chairman of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. With the Ethiopian military regime or Derg combatting a number of insurgencies, including that in Eritrea for independence, its support for the SPLA and Garang as its leader was premised upon an armed struggle for a united and reformed ‘New Sudan’, and not the secession probably supported by most educated southern Sudanese at the time. Garang’s approach followed from his commitment to leftist and pan-African politics. But it also served the practical need of acquiring military assistance, winning support in northern Sudan, and avoiding the enmity of powerful Arab and Moslem countries in the region that would come to Sudan’s rescue if they concluded the Arab world was under threat.

While mainstream history contends that the second southern Sudanese rebellion began under the SPLA in 1983, in fact Nuer calling themselves Anyanya 2 launched a minor insurgency along the Ethiopian border six years earlier demanding secession. In the ensuing struggle between Anyanya 2 and the SPLA the Dinka-dominated SPLA with the support of the Derg was victorious. But in the contest to assume the dominant position in the war against Khartoum, Garang noted, ‘The first bullets in the southern war were fought against separatists’. He might also have said that the first people killed by the SPLA were Nuer, including their leader, Samuel Gai Tut, and those events are still a source of grievance for Nuer.

Despite enormous support from the Derg, the Eastern Bloc, cash hand-outs from Libya, and assistance from Zimbabwe and other African states, SPLA successes were limited. Its efforts were undermined by the growing internal opposition it fostered among southern Sudanese angered at the SPLA’s brutality, arrogance, and the Dinka’s practice of bringing their crop-destroying cattle into the farming lands of Equatoria. Frequently, these communities formed local self-defence militias that were supported by Khartoum, which considered them a means of counter-insurgency on the cheap. The foremost internal armed resistance movement to the SPLA that emerged was the South Sudan Defense Force (SSDF), a Nuer-dominated organization, but which included components from virtually every community in southern Sudan. Like Anyanya 2, which it largely absorbed, the SSDF called for secession from the north.

With its national agenda, the SPLA also carried out military operations in the north of the country and while not successful in the riverine core or Darfur, with the assistance of the Derg and its successors, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), it captured the border territory of Blue Nile state and a swath of territory in eastern Sudan. Lands along the Ugandan border in southern Sudan were also captured by Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Ugandan forces and turned over to the SPLA. The biggest success of the SPLA, however, was in the Nuba Mountains in the centre of Sudan, and its peoples soon formed a major component of the SPLA. These same Nuba Mountain rebels would later be disillusioned with the SPLA when the territory did not gain the right of self-determination or affiliation with an independent South Sudan.

In 1989, the National Islamic Front (NIF) came to power in Khartoum as a result of a coup against the democratically elected government of Sadig al Mahdi. The in-coming Islamist regime not only set out to subvert neighbouring states, but also declared the war in the south to be a jihad and devoted enormous resources to defeating the SPLA. Making matters worse for the SPLA, Drs Riek Machar, a Nuer, and Lam Akol, a Shilluk, broke with the party in 1991 over the lack of internal democracy and Garang’s opposition to southern self-determination, and took many thousands into opposition with them. While Riek and Lam probably had the support of most southern Sudanese over these demands, Garang had international credibility and could gain assistance far beyond their reach. As a result, Riek and Lam were increasingly forced to turn to Khartoum for support and this soon took the form of an alliance.

At the core of this alliance was the 1997 Khartoum Peace Agreement under which the national government agreed to a generous sharing of oil revenues and committed to holding a vote on southern self-determination. However, the NIF was divided on implementing the Khartoum Peace Agreement and some of Riek’s followers, including his first lieutenant, Taban Deng, returned in frustration to the SPLA. Riek too left Khartoum and first took up residence in Nairobi, attempting to establish a rival organization before reconciling with Garang in 2002 and assuming the number three position in the SPLM behind Salva. Lam followed a similar trajectory and returned to the SPLA.

NIF subversion of neighbouring states led to not only direct push back from the states involved, but also increasing cooperation and support for the SPLA. Fear that the NIF would undermine its regional allies led to the US introducing increasingly severe sanctions against Sudan and providing military support to countries in the region facing NIF subversion. Some of these supplies were turned over to the SPLA. Regional opposition to the NIF and support for the SPLA developed to the point that it appeared the regime might be overthrown, but such hopes were dashed when Eritrea and Ethiopia fought a brutal border war between 1998 and 2000. This led them to reconcile with Khartoum, giving the regime a new lease on life.

Despite this new-found unity, the SPLA was never able to defeat the Sudanese army, win the support of the people of southern Sudan, much less provide an adequate administration in its liberated territories. By the early 2000s a south–south conflict had overtaken the north–south conflict between a similar sized Dinka-dominated SPLA and a Nuer-dominated SSDF. The inability to end the war either militarily or through internal negotiations, the increasing threat it posed to regional security, and the growing humanitarian crisis provided the stimulus for a number of external peace initiatives. In the end, however, the initiative by the regional IGAD became the accepted process. IGAD was created and funded by Western states to meet its development needs in the Horn of Africa and later its members were pressed to establish a peace committee, which was likewise funded by the West, and it was this body that assumed the task of peace-making in Sudan.

Crucial to realizing this task was gaining the support of the US, and this was only accomplished after its close regional ally, Kenya, assumed the primary role in the mediation. Actual negotiations were conducted by General Lazrus Sumbeiywo, who was trusted because he had devoted his military career to keeping the country’s aging dictator, Daniel arap Moi, in power and had a record of closely cooperating on security matters with the CIA. To further ensure Western interests were kept at the fore, the IGAD mediation was supported by a Troika made up of the US, UK, and Norway, and they in turn were financially assisted by the Friends of IGAD, a group of Western donor states.

These efforts in turn could not have succeeded without the ideological shift that Garang’s SPLA underwent to distance itself from its Communist past and endorse the new US-led post-Cold War world order. The ideological shift was made possible for three reasons: first, the SPLA’s commitment to Marxism was skin-deep and shaped by the opportunistic need for largely Derg and Eastern Bloc support; second – and this will be considered in the next chapter – the skills of its American supporters in repackaging Garang as a liberal democrat and the subsequent narrative of American evangelical Christians that the SPLA was leading a war of persecuted Christian Africans against an Arab Islamic expansionist government in Khartoum; and lastly, the SPLA could no longer send its cadres to Eastern Europe for training. Instead, increasing numbers of them began joining the movement via Kenya and the US where they had supped deeply on the prevailing anti-socialist doctrines of those states. Western democratic rhetoric became the order of the day, even though that could not have contrasted more with the tightly controlled strictures of the SPLM or the feudal-tribal realities of rural South Sudan.

The pieces were falling into place for the success of the IGAD/Troika negotiations. What remained was the interest of the NCP in pursuing the peace process. First, although the NCP had a responsibility to protect the national integrity of the Sudanese state, it had a partisan interest in pursuing an Islamist agenda and in that light southern Sudan was a drag and even a threat. Better to let the territory go, in the view of many Islamists, in order that a fully Arab and Islamic society could be constructed. Second, the war was financially debilitating, with further costs being borne as a result of US-led efforts to economically marginalize the country. Pursuing peace with the SPLA offered the prospect that the sanctions woul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Authors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 The Deep Roots and Twisted Path to Civil War
• 2 The Misadventures of an American Midwife
• 3 The Descent into Civil War
• 4 The Establishment of the SPLM-IO
• 5 Laying the Groundwork for Future Failures
• 6 The Collapse of the Peace Agreement
• 7 Coming Out of the Shadows
• 8 Conclusion: Collapse of an Illusion
• Postscript
• Notes
• References
• Index